Director/Story – Egor Baranov, Screenplay – Joe Rechtman, Producers – Egor Baranov, Timur Bekmambetov, Aleksandr Fomin, David Meades & Maria Zatulovskaya, Photography – Ezequiel Casares, Music – Ryan Otter, Visual Effects – Sitnikov, Pro, Production Design – Chris Davis. Production Company – Bazelevs/Logical Pictures.
Cast
Dave Davis (Stanley Martin), Karli Hall (Audrey Martin), Erika Chase (Rat), Kristen Ariza (Agent Ortiz), Brad Greenquist (Father Degal), Ezra Buzzington (Father Hill), Julian Moser (Teenage Nicholas Martin), Beau Boyd (Young Nicholas Martin), Michael Javier Villar (Frank Collins), Maryna Bennett (Rose Patterson), Timothy V. Murphy (Father Flynn)
Plot
Stanley Martin is driving home from a school sports event with his son Nicholas. However, he has had a couple of drinks at the game. Distracted by a video chat with his wife Audrey, he has a crash, killing Nicholas. Following the funeral, Stanley and Audrey split. Audrey is then approached by the Catholic Church who propose that Nicholas be the first subject in a new resurrection process. She accepts and Nicholas is brought back to life. The resurrection process becomes a sensation around the world, although details are kept a tightly guarded secret by the Catholics. It is only administered to believers, resulting in mass conversions to Catholicism. Five years later, Stanley has become a priest with the church and has a job counselling the Resurrecteds, although is estranged from Audrey and Nicholas. One of Stanley’s Resurrected clients then pushes his co-workers to their deaths from the building site where he works. As Stanley investigates, he discovers a series of incidents where other Resurrecteds have gone on killing sprees. He teams up with the hacker Rat to find the truth where they uncover the existence of a cult that is being kept a secret by the church.
Russian director Timur Bekmambetov made a big splash in the West with Night Watch (2004) and went on to make a number of other works, including the English-language likes of Wanted (2008), Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (2012) and Ben Hur (2016). Bekmambetov has been even more prolific as a producer with his Bazelevs production company behind genre efforts like the animated 9 (2009), Apollo 18 (2011), The Darkest Hour (2011), Hardcore Henry (2015) and other works, most of which have been made for English-language audiences.
Bekmambetov and Bazelevs had previously produced Unfriended (2014), a unique film in which the film screen became a computer screen and the entire drama took place across various video messaging apps, browsers and social media pages – something that has since been referred to as ‘screenlife films’. Resurrected continues in that same vein – a different type of film but one in which the film screen again becomes a computer screen and the drama takes place between various video recordings, chat windows and app interfaces, even ventures into Virtual Reality church services.
Resurrected has an interesting and original idea where the Catholic Church has perfected a means of resurrecting people. Notedly it is one where the script draws a curtain across details of the resurrection process and has it kept a secret by the church. The film is at its most fascinating when depicting the worldwide reaction to the process – the church receiving record numbers of converts, those sceptical and opposed, or the idea of smuggling people out of Islamic countries and posthumously baptising them so they can be resurrected.
Father Dave Davis (in chat window top) and son Julian Moser in a room filled with dead bodies
There is even the rather amusing scene where we see Dave Davis logging onto the Catholic equivalent of the dark web that comes with notifications like “This site has been labelled sinful by the Catholic Church” and “May you sin in peace.” Some of the Catholicism depicted is a little dubious – the church regards the confessional as sacrosanct even after the confessor dies but Dave Davis is given orders to hand over records of counselling sessions to an FBI investigator at one point.
About a third of the way in, the film abandons the exploration of the resurrection process in favour of becoming a conspiracy thriller, concerning efforts by the church to cover up the deaths and even the existence of those who were counselling them. During these scenes, Dave Davis teams up with hacker girl Erika Chase to get to the truth. These scenes work okay, although the film is a little vague about the whys of things – like what is causing the reurrecteds to turn into killers, why the church is enabling them, and what their mass attack is intended to achieve. It feels like the whole conspiracy angle could have been better fleshed out than it is.
Russian director Egor Baranov has had a modest output of films since appearing with Suicides (2012). He has also made Nightingale: The Robber (2012); Russia’s first erotic film Locust (2014); a trilogy of horror films featuring the Russian horror writer Nikolai Gogol with Gogol: The Beginning (2017), Gogol: Viy (2018) and Gogol: A Terrible Vengeance (2018); and the alien invasion film The Blackout (2019).
